The last time Humankind was on the Moon was in 1972. We had a Cold War (history might be repeating) and a Space Race. NASA and the rest of the Government stopped until the new century when private spaceflight companies started overtaking NASA. The International Space Station hangs in Earth’s orbit, not as a bridge but as a Marker buoy.
I know one friend studying to be an astronaut; Another friend is a futurist and with the rise of Elon Musk, the future is coming back to America. Images of the future were like covers of sci-fi books drawn by Gernsback. To imagine the future now, most artists do the post-apocalypse. There is no joy between Long Island, NY and Long Beach, CA.
Dare I say Elon Musk lit a spark in NASA to bring about the Artemis Program? To bring humans back to the Moon and Mars is a great goal. The American Frontier closed in 1890, but Carl Sagan talked of opening another Frontier:
The Lost Art of Discovering the Frontier
I think this is another example of politics being downstream from culture. A lot of the mainstream SF publishers have been pushing post-apocalyptic SF or fantasy, and this has had an effect on the subculture formerly noted for being rife with gearheads and tech nerds. I can't remember the last time I saw the L-5 Society (or their successors, the National Space Society) have a table at an SF convention.